A number of very happy Serbs were packed into a tiny restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side on Saturday night, celebrating the success of their remarkable movie, “Here and There,” which two nights earlier had won the Best New York Narrative award at the Tribeca Film Festival. The restaurant, Kafana, is itself a Serbian enterprise, and director Darko Lungulov, passing the Blog a glass of Montenegrin wine, explained that he had picked it not least because of its kitchen. He said that when he wants really good Serbian food (defined as “a lot of meat” by another celebrant), he comes here – from Serbia.
Well, maybe. Lungulov, dark-eyed, long-haired, lightly bearded and wearing a pair of shoes with some sort of psychedelic landscape painted on them, is half a New Yorker himself. He studied film at CCNY in the ’90s, and after attaining his BA began directing documentaries. He moved back to Serbia six years ago, to his home town of Belgrade, where he came up with the idea and then wrote the script for “Here and There,” which is set in both cities. Read more...
On the Line: The buzz has been pretty good, from what I could tell. What's not to love -- it's a story about fat Israelis sumo wrestling, and it's in Hebrew! All of these things combined sound mind-bending.
On the Line: Technically, I didn't wait on line. I cheated and got tickets through a very nice publicist working on this film ... not to mention that I arrived just in the nick of time before the lights dimmed. I did, however, arrive early enough to ride the escalator with a woman who was shouting "Yeah, CBGB!" to people she passed.